For much of Iranian history the
Persian word for “politics” had two meanings. Siyasatreferred to the
emperor’s art of preserving his dynasty against rivals and invaders. Or it
referred to the cruel and unusual punishments the emperor meted out to officials
who displeased him, ranging from flogging and blinding to beheading.

Keep this in mind as the current
emperor, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, stages an election on Friday, the first
since last summer’s nuclear deal with the great powers. At stake are the
Majlis, or Parliament, as well as the Assembly of Experts, the clerical body
that will select and nominally oversee the ailing Mr. Khamenei’s successor.

There will be ballot boxes and
voter lines, and Western journalists will be granted rare access to cover an
event the regime is keen to portray as a legitimate democratic exercise. Yet
every candidate has been screened by layers of security men and hand-selected by
Islamic jurists.

Half of the original 12,000 or so
candidates for the 290-seat Majlis were disqualified ahead of the election. As
were 75% of the 801 candidates for the 88-member Assembly of Experts—including Hassan
Khomeini, the grandson of regime founder AyatollahRuhollah Khomeini. That
leaves a ratio of candidates to seats in the Assembly of Experts of less than
two.

Most of the disqualified belonged
to the so-called reformist and moderate factions of the regime. Even if every
single disqualification were reversed, however, it wouldn’t matter a wit,
since the regime’s popular branches are subservient to its unelected
institutions. Above them all sits the supreme leader, and the pre-election purge
means whoever succeeds Mr. Khamenei is likely to share his views on all
important matters.

Herein lies the perverse genius of
the Islamic Republic. It encourages outsiders to treat the regime as something
other than a theocratic dictatorship. Western officials, and many Iranians
themselves, hope that the regime’s periodic elections and plebiscites might
finally empower men who will moderate Tehran’s behavior. It’s been 37 years
since the regime’s founding, and liberal Khomeinists remain elusive.

The hard-liners—the men who run
the armed forces, the repressive apparatus, the nuclear program, the judiciary
and the state-run media—are tightening their grip and flaunting their enduring
primacy.

On the domestic front, the regime
has launched a fresh crackdown against degar-andishan, dissidents or
“other-thinkers”—poets, film makers, journalists and novelists who
question its rule. Tehran is also warning off Iranian-Americans eager to cash in
on their commercial connections now that international sanctions have been
lifted. Security forces in October arrested Siamak Namazi, an American
energy consultant who had long advocated for the removal of sanctions and a
Washington-Tehran opening. On Monday, Mr. Namazi’s U.S. citizen father, Baquer,
was arrested after apparently being lured back by the regime.

Restrictions on women’s rights
remain as tight as ever. “Day by day the women’s conditions get worse,
contrary to Western expectations,” says Darya Safai, a Belgium-based
activist who campaigns against the ban on Iranian women entering sports
stadiums.

Two ballistic-missile tests since
the nuclear deal, plus the seizure and humiliation of 10 U.S. sailors in
January, suggest the ayatollahs are stepping up their regional bullying. A group
of regime-linked media outlets this week announced they had donated $600,000 to
the bounty for Salman Rushdie, raising to $4 million the total prize
pool on the British novelist’s head for insulting the Prophet Muhammad.

Still, the dream of reforming the
system from within remains alive. Regime elites wrangle over the tone of
Iranian foreign policy. And some have technocratic pretensions when it comes to
domestic administration.

But they agree on the most
fundamental questions—the sanctity of the nuclear program, an anti-Western
foreign policy and the theocratic character of the regime. As an exiled
reformist recently told me: “The reformists won’t ever drill a hole in the
hull of the Islamic Republic boat because they are passengers on that boat and
would drown without it.”

If past is precedent, the
reformists inside the system may be thrown overboard even if the vessel
doesn’t draw water. Indeed, that may already be what’s under way with the
current purge. Many of the same figures, after all, presided over the period of
supposed moderation and reform that stretched from Ayatollah Khomeini’s death
in 1989 until 2005, when the reformist President Mohammad Khatami lost
power.

Then, too, the reformists darned
Iran’s tattered relations with the outside world in ways the hard-line core
found useful. But all the while, the hard-liners maintained a deep state—built
on secret detention sites, extrajudicial serial killings and the like—that
targeted Mr. Khatami’s middle-class, urban base. Eventually the deep state
undid most of his mild domestic reforms, and many reformists found themselves in
jail.

Iranians hungry for change
nevertheless think their only chance is to channel their aspirations into these
factional disputes. The reformists are a little less stern. They afford the
people more personal freedom at the margins.

Can you blame them? The bloody
crackdown against the 2009 postelection uprising, followed by the cataclysms in
Syria, led them to conclude that mass protest is hopeless. One reason the
mullahs sponsored Bashar Assad’s slaughter was to teach their own people
how far they would go before relinquishing power.

Other Iranians have become
apathetic—or worse, they’ve embraced Persian chauvinism as a substitute for
the pro-democracy spirit of that summer. It is all the more remarkable, then,
that the regime would shut off even the release spigot offered by its own sham
electoral system. Having secured a nuclear deal on favorable terms, they don’t
even need the veneer of respectability offered by the reformist project.